Farewell to Legacy Technologies: Delivery Calculator Case Study
Updated: Mar 14, 2023
Contents:
What makes you abandon your online shopping cart?
We, 88% of e-commerce enthusiasts, often do it because of curiosity. Who doesn't want to know the total cost of the planned purchase? Some are distracted from the checkout process.
But if the intentions are serious: the lack of trust gets in the way. Often, buyers aren't ready to share credit card details or are outraged by the hidden timing & shipping costs. Legacy technologies partly support this issue.
Here you'll discover why digital transformation in retail demands online delivery calculator improvement and how to perform reengineering of legacy systems like this one.
Client
National non-food retailer with 27 million buyers and 10 million online shoppers.
Request
Every mid- / large-size retail company uses an online delivery calculator. It creates additional convenience for buyers, who can define whether the time & cost of shipping are suitable.
In flawless conditions, the system works like the following. You open a website product catalog, click on any item you like, and receive the above data as a nice bonus to the general information about the SKU.
Our client used outdated software for this purpose. Unfortunately, it couldn't handle an overload and periodically failed. The number of abandoned carts increased, as well as the number of complaints.
The company decided to perform a digital transformation and a retail delivery calculator became the core bottleneck.
The client refused ready-made solutions because they cannot cover its business needs: like real-time computing for thousands of requests simultaneously. So the company turned to custom development.
JEVERA engineers faced the following challenges:
the need to create a scalable system proceeding countless requests
provide data processing in real-time
provide broad computing power
build integrations with the rest of the back-office systems
think over all possible scenarios of software operation
Solution
In just a few months, the team has created a desirable microservices-based product. It was a kind of additional module that works in conjunction with the monolith. This approach ensured the smooth software operation and its independence from other systems.
"The concept of an online delivery calculator is quite simple. But it all depends on a business scale. In this case, we worked on creating a complex robust product that would not let our client down," admits Evgeniy Aleksandrenko, Head of Digital Transformation at JEVERA. "A majority of time was spent on solving three main tasks:
systematization of query parameters
calculation mechanism designing
passing query results"
The new system works as follows.
A user enters the company's web portal and logs in. The portal generates data about the client's location.
A customer's click on any product triggers a series of processes. They should be finished before a web page loads.
The portal transfers geolocation data to the software.
Delivery calculator contacts the warehouse management system to determine if the desired product is available in warehouses closest to the buyer.
In parallel, the calculator receives data from the transport management system on whether the company can deliver the goods by itself.
If there's no such an opportunity, the delivery calculator connects with third-party courier services and discovers their capabilities.
Based on the above data, the software calculates and determines the time & cost of shipping.
The perfect web page load speed for e-commerce is about 2 seconds. All these processes should be performed during this time. Don't forget that the system processes lots of requests simultaneously.
Due to migration from legacy system to new delivery calculator software, the client:
improved customer experience
prevented possible damages caused by abandoned carts
ensured accurate calculation of time & costs of shipping
improved interoperability between systems
initiated migration to microservices
Results
The customer received a robust microservice-based solution — a separate module that is capable of handling over 10k of delivery combinations and showing them to the buyers in real-time.
Technologies
Java 11, Jhipster 6.4.1 (jhipster-registry, uaa, gate, business services), Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Redis, Oracle (existing db), PostgreSQL (new db). Liquibase, Hibernate, MapStruct, Jackson, junit5, Mockito, Gradle, Angular, DevExpress.
If you're still thinking about how to migrate to a new online delivery calculator, contact our experts. We'll gladly share our expertise and advise you the right way.